LCF 2017 highlights: Social Responsibility and Sustainability

The LCF Better Lives agenda encourages dialogue between staff, students and the wider community to develop an understanding and definition of what social responsibility and sustainability means, and how we can use fashion to shape lives, and discuss issues that affect the world and humankind. Below we highlight some of the 2017 most successful projects and events.

Dress for Our Time

An image of our time – One of the many paintings made in Za’atari- how people flee to find safety may change, but we must find more ways to respond to a world now on the move in ever increasing numbers.

A post shared by Dress for Our Time (@dress4ourtime) on Nov 23, 2017 at 7:28am PST

• March: Professor Helen Storey kicked off the year’s Better Lives lectures with a talk entitled, “Society: we are all migrants”
• April: Then she spoke at the Youth Engagement and the Global Refugee Crisis Conference in Dubai
• May: After collecting tens of thousands of pounds worth of makeup through a beauty co-op, Helen and colleagues went to Za’atari camp and delivered a beauty training course
• July: They then went back to the camp a few months later to deliver the LOVECOATS project with the Tiger Girls
• September: Helen’s final project in the camp this year was a perfume workshop with Givaudan Paris

Conscious Contemporary Tailoring

LCF students Holly and Yubin with three weavers from the community

• Students visited the San Patrignano Rehabilitation community and the Zegna Foundation, as part of an ongoing project.
• Women from LCF’s Making for Change prison project and members of the San Patrignano rehabilitation community exchange gifts and letters ahead of Christmas

HRH The Countess of Wessex visits Making for Change unit at HMP/YOI Downview

• HRH The Countess of Wessex, Patron of LCF visited the ‘Making for Change’ fashion training and manufacturing unit at HMP/YOI Downview. She met staff and prisoners and awarded participants with certificates as part of their rehabilitative training programme.

UN Orange Label Project

Today we launch 16 Days of Activism with the UN #ORANGELABEL project, to end violence against women. We are encouraging the fashion industry to show their support by uploading an image featuring the colour orange to social media using the hashtag #OrangeLabelProject. Image by Kit Skellington.

A post shared by London College of Fashion, UAL (@lcflondon_) on Nov 25, 2017 at 1:20am PST

• On Saturday 25th November the winners of this year’s Orange Label Project were announced. The project is a collaboration between LCF and the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women

Kering Award

Kering’s Marie Claire-Daveu and Beatrice Lazat with Marco Bizzarri and Professor Frances Corner

•  Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri was guest of honour for the annual LCFxKering Talk on sustainable fashion. In his in-conversation with Eco-Age founder Livia Firth, he announced that Gucci will be joining the fur-free alliance as of next year.

• Find out more about Better Lives at LCF
• Find out more about the Centre for Sustainable Fashion